Entries tagged with ebay

My sweetie, Dave, has finally learned how to make his Amazon and eBay purchases after/through visiting my lenses. This is good as he is basically an Italian-art book hound who must buy any new title released and is always haunting eBay for specialty Italian items. Just this week he bought 3 high-end perfumes from Florence via eBay - so now he'll smell good AND he helped some of my lenses get a lens rank boost.

On to other things - and lessons learned.

This morning I was working on my Police fan survey lens, which has been sinking pretty bad in rank. I realized two big problems, both rather late in the game:

1. I'm heavily involved in Police fandom, so I knew I could get a lot of my friends to vote in it. And boy, did they! But here's the thing - I was still early in my Squidooing days and didn't realize I wouldn't get a Tier payout on it until the month AFTER it was published! I should have waited a few weeks and THEN promoted it on the mailing lists and forums I belong to. It's a shame because I actually got the lens up to about 1,000 in the rank, and it finished Tier 2 for that first month, but I got nothing for it. By the time it entered it's first "official" month? All the hardcore Police fans had answered it and weren't checking back.

I might try to do an analysis write-up to post to some of those forums to encourage people to come back and see how they compared in their opinions to others. Because that's the only way I know I'll ever get really good traffic on that lens.

2. Lesson 2 I've been learning about ALL of my music lenses. I was dumb to put in Amazon modules with all of the basic Police albums and videos. Because the kind of fans who are going to visit my lens and want to take the survey? Are fans who already HAVE all of that stuff! What I need to be trying to sell are unique, rare and collectible items. High-end eBay auctions for autographs, gold records, tie-in musical instruments, etc. Because believe me, THAT'S the kind of stuff my Police fan friends buy. I have friends who will fight in to the thousands of $$$'s for photo negatives, reel-to-reel tapes, gold records and other really unique Police items. Again I'm *headdesking* for not realizing this earlier, and I want to rework a lot of the sales modules on my music lenses to really push the high-end collectibles instead of the basics.

But I guess, these are just the things we learn from experience. I used to feel weird pushing expensive merchandise on Squidoo...then I had someone come to my Pink Floyd survey page last week and buy about 30 items in one shot, all Floyd related, on Amazon including collectible figurines at about $150 a shot. If I'm targeting hardcore fans, I've got to try to sell them hardcore merchandise. That's the path to better sales royalties that I'm seeing ahead of me. Now, to implement it for success.

Well, after enduring a dental appointment to get my first crown today (ugh), about all I felt like doing when I got home was working on some lenses. I don't know why it was so draining but it actually was more painful/uncomfortable than when I got the root canal on this tooth. I like this dentist but he only gave me one small shot for the pain this time...I think when I have to get one other tooth done up for a crown in January I'm going to say I need more numbing. Plus all the yucky taste of the glue and crap in my mouth...ugh! Not fun! And tedious too, spending about 2 hours in the chair either clenching my teeth shut or having to keep them open while waiting for this or that step.

Anyway. So I got home and decided to do a little more lens work. I'm really keen on maximizing the potential of eBay modules at the moment. I kind of ignored them in the past or just threw them on without a whole lot of thought of how to really utilize their potential. Then I read a really great lens this morning on Ebay commissions and how to maximize them and I learned a lot. Especially about trying to get those sales quickly instead of "whenever", so I went thru some lenses to see where I could switch from "list auctions ending any time" to those ending either within 6 hours or the next day. Not every search term has that many auctions running right now, but for instance, my Fontanini Nativity lens does as there are lots of listings for their nativity figurines right now. So I souped up that lens with more ebay modules and switching what I could to soon-ending auctions. We'll see if it makes a difference.

I'm on a mission next to see where I can add relevant eBay modules to other lenses or how to better tune the ones I have for maximum performance. Yesterday I apparently had three eBay sales from my da Vinci gift lens - for Italian perfumes of all things, each about $50-60. I'm not complaining, though I think it may just have been Dr. D buying them as I know he's just an addict for that stuff and probably surfed over to ebay after browsing the lens at work :-P I'll have to ask him tonight when he gets home...